Robot-inspired fun at Winnacunnet

HAMPTON — With its VEX Robotics program, Winnacunnet High School isn't just encouraging its young scientists to further careers in engineering, but also those at other schools around the Seacoast.

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By Nick B. Reid

seacoastonline.com

By Nick B. Reid

Posted Feb. 11, 2014 at 2:00 AM
Updated Feb 11, 2014 at 8:38 AM

By Nick B. Reid

Posted Feb. 11, 2014 at 2:00 AM
Updated Feb 11, 2014 at 8:38 AM

» Social News

HAMPTON — With its VEX Robotics program, Winnacunnet High School isn't just encouraging its young scientists to further careers in engineering, but also those at other schools around the Seacoast.

Jim Muthig, a technology teacher at Winnacunnet who mentors the robotics-inclined students, has seen more than a few go from building on the Winnacunnet grounds to studying mechanical engineering and computer science at universities.

As the Winnacunnet program grows — the school fielded four teams for the competition it hosted Saturday, and the senior students are more than capable of coaching the freshmen — Muthig has turned his focus to involving other local schools.

Exeter High School and Berwick Academy participated for the first time on Saturday, he said, adding that he's "put out feelers" to get Dover, Portsmouth and others to join in as well.

As the Seacoast scene grows, the students could hold more local competitions to refine their designs without traveling an hour or more to common hosts like Pembroke Academy or Kennett High School in North Conway.

Tyler Collins, a Winnacunnet graduate, was one of the first students at the school to get into robotics about three years ago. For a senior project, he got funding from the school to order a kit, and after a good deal of trial and error, he had a catapulting robot that used a spatula to fling objects through the air. It wasn't for competition, but the fun of experimentation set him out on his current track as a junior in information technology at the University of New Hampshire.

"It kind of started me off on the technology field in college," Collins said while volunteering Saturday.

Muthig said almost all his robotics students continue on in a related field in college.

Jeff Anderson, a Winnacunnet graduate who's a freshman in mechanical engineering at UNH, was also volunteering on Saturday. He said he's a member of UNH's LunaCats, which he said is a group that has a similar, if more technical and expensive goal than the high schools robotics teams. At the end of the semester, he said the LunaCats will take a robot they've created to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for NASA's Robotics Mining Competition, where the robots perform tasks like those of a lunar rover in one of the closest simulations of lunar soil on earth.

At Winnacunnet, silvery robots with paddles, belts and extending arms pushed beach balls into designated zones, lifted plastic dodecahedrons off the ground and dunked them into skinny, 2-foot-tall plastic cylinders. In some cases they reached about 4 feet up to grab a horizontal bar and perform a pull-up. The various objectives earned points for teams in a head-to-head battle.

Many of the robots' actions were controlled by students with Xbox-like controllers, but in the moments after the start of each competition, the robots are totally autonomous.

Programmers like Winnacunnet senior Tanner Quinn use a language called Robot C to tell the robots to perform actions like driving forward a certain distance, reaching its arm up, poking the beach ball in the right direction and then resetting to another location. Quinn said he'll soon hear back about whether he got into Carnegie Mellon University, his college of choice, to study computer science in Pittsburgh, Pa.

He prefers to use the more advanced language, Robot C, over a more drag-and-drop-oriented language called Easy C.

"It's harder but if you become good at programming it's faster,' he said.

With 15 students on the robotics team, Quinn said there's enough so the older students can serve as the foundations of four teams and the freshmen can get distributed around to help out and learn the ropes. The youngest student on the team is actually an eighth-grader at North Hampton School, who's getting an extra-early start.

"He's going to be hopefully a rocket scientist (by the time he graduates)," Muthig said.

One of Winnacunnet's teams advanced to the quaterfinal round Saturday, while teams from Pembroke Academy, Kennett High School and Manchester's Trinity High School took home many of the awards. Muthig said 60 teams attended this year, beating out last year's mark of 48 and bringing the Winnacunnet gymnasium to maximum capacity.

Winnacunnet began hosting last year after David Kelly, a Pembroke science teacher, used his Christa McAuliffe Sabbatical to spread the VEX Robotics competitions throughout the state.